Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/59

THE EELIGIOUS INSTINCT. 43 than those of a lower order, and less powerful unless they are allowed time in which to develop. Thus it conies about that under special stress individuals tend to act as individuals rather than as members of a social body, and thus often there is required some emphatic presentation to the mind, of the opposition which indi- vidualism is making to these racial demands, perhaps a summation of such emphatic presentations, in order to bring the racial impulses into play. How often does the unscrupulous politician come to believe that the masses have lost all moral sense, because he sees no opposition to his action ; how often is he surprised when, after many repetitions of aggravated crimes against their everj^-day morality, he finds them suddenly arising in revolt, upon what seems to him to be a most trivial indiscretion on his part ; finds them, moved by a deep-lying moral sense, thrusting him aside as an unworthy servant. It appears then that the mere complication of our life, with its enormous variety of forceful stimulations, itself implies emphasis of the variant influence ; and the more complex therefore the life becomes, the more distracting the stimuli to action, the greater will appear the danger of disadvantageous subordination of the racial impulses. 4. Let me now draw attention to another and most im- portant influence at work leading us to emphasise variance in our lives. We have seen, in what has preceded this, that instinct actions tend to become unconscious ; and that this occurs in certain cases where these actions have become thoroughly co-ordinated, so that their instinct feelings do not become forceful in the pre-eminent consciousness ; or in other cases where these instinct feelings become disconnected from the brain consciousness, either through incommensurability of rhythm or by other means. But demands for reactions of distinctly individualistic significance, especially where they are emphasised by rational processes, do not show this tendency to become unconscious, and hence are not so likely to lose their forcefulness in our psychic life. I would here recall to the reader's attention the fact closely related to that just mentioned, that individually acquired habits of action must tend to become unconscious exactly as the instincts do ; for if persisted in they grad- ually become more and more fully co-ordinated, and less and less forceful on their conscious side ; in fact they seem